special interest subsites?

We could probably feed the content from articles and blog posts with selected tags into separate sites that are designed to look attractive to their audiences. For example we could have one about document preparation and office (LaTeX, Scribus, OOo), one about graphics design (Inkscape, GIMP), one about photography (gphoto frontends such as digiKam, again GIMP, Hugin), one about music production, one about video production, etc etc. Apart from copying content from nuxified, these would contain some links and information about the software discussed on them. Maybe they could have forums hosted on nuxified, too.

How does this help? Well... I think these will make a great first impression on people searching for info on a specific topic, much better than "just another forum about linux", and also these would do a good job at "selling" freedomware:

"look at all the cool stuff you can do with freedomware related to a topic you actually care about!. You like photography? Then here's all we know about photo management and editing, no need to search through lots of unrelated articles. You want to create a newsletter? Have a presentation? Write a report? Draw graphs? These are your options. You want to create neat graphics? Check out this software, and this..."

In other words, I think we should put attractive and audience-targeted wrappings around things we're writing about freedomware anyway, and at the same time let these subsite-wrappings inspire us to write more articles.

Another thing: think of the link exchange opportunities!

EDIT/clarification: for a better user experience, we could the original nuxified drupal installation manage these subsites. A different theme is possible on a separate page (eg nuxified.org/photofreak/ ), right?

EDIT/addition: we could add links to articles of friend sites (such as polishlinux) to have more content.

A very interesting idea. It builds on the fact we have tags enabled in all major sections of the site.

As discussed on IRC, though, a challenge is in how to get people to tag their forum topics right so that they too can be properly included in a subsite with a number of given tags included in it. Even today, while we do have tagging enabled many users don't seem to be tagging their posts. And as you said (on IRC), forcing them to might annoy them.

But whether I can include tags under which the topic will be added I'm not sure.

Another thing to consider is that Nuxified.org is still running Drupal 4.7.x while Drupal 5.x is long out, so after upgrading Libervis.com to it Nuxified.org may follow, which will require adapting of the theme as well as various other custom features we added. Drupal 5 might contain some features not present in Drupal 4.7, or just different ways some things work.

Right now I feel rather conservative about changing things too much, as long as the site works as it is, before I'm really ready to commit to a full scale upgrade and subsequent improvements.

But we can try to iron this idea out. We wont be sticking to the status quo forever, and this seems like a very nice improvement idea.

Maybe drupal offers a cleaner way, but this old-fashioned way will work too.

Quote:

Another thing to consider is that Nuxified.org is still running Drupal 4.7.x while Drupal 5.x is long out, so after upgrading Libervis.com to it Nuxified.org may follow, which will require adapting of the theme as well as various other custom features we added. Drupal 5 might contain some features not present in Drupal 4.7, or just different ways some things work.

It may indeed be better to do the upgrade first. OTOH I don't think the needed features for this idea are so advanced they are likely to have changed much in Drupal 5.

>> After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.
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